Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition: Trent Oster Interview @ ShackNews

November 17th, 2012, 22:33

After the previous announcement that Sony wanted Baldur's Gate Extended Edition on PSN, Shacknews now also brings us their full interview with Beamdog's Trent Oster about about the game's initial delay, the new content, plans for DLC and, Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced Edition.

Shacknews: When the release date for BG:EE was first announced as September, you knew that you were adding new content and new characters. What happened along the way that ended up pushing the date back?Trent Oster: We were a little over confident we could whip the existing Baldur's Gate codebase into a shippable shape in a timely manner. Early in development, we made good progress. Later, we hit a brick wall. We'd try to work with the existing system, it wouldn't work, we'd start spelunking around looking for the problem and the complexity we encountered was off the charts. We'd cut the complexity down and introduce new bugs. We'd fix the bugs, introducing more. We really were in a hard cycle of code cleanup and bug fixing. In September we had a brittle version of the game that simply lacked polish and didn't feel well executed. We worked very hard to fix bugs and improve the game, but the progress just wasn't what was required to make a game we could be proud of. We approached our partners, telling them clearly that we were unhappy with the state of the project and we wanted to extend the ship date. The Wizards people were very supportive and in full agreement, they understood the importance of making a high quality product. It took a while for us to work out the business terms for the extension and that forced us to wait on the delay announcement much longer than we would have liked. As a small developer, funding two more months of additional development and going two months without revenue was a hard call to make, but we are certain it was the right decision.